I’m pleased to finally be able to announce the highly anticipated, long awaited, release of ClassiPress 3.1! This has been a release in the making for many months and is a culmination of countless hours of work from our entire team and our beta testers (thanks guys & gals).
The most notable features in this release include:
Advanced Search
Not all categories have the same type of ads, right? For example, ad listings for cars would be quite different than real estate listings. Not to worry. ClassiPress 3.1 now sports the most advanced WordPress search around. It allows you to create category-specific search modules so your visitors can easily refine their search results.
Each category search module includes a radius (by city or zip code) and price slider for pinpoint accuracy (due to geocoding each ad using the Google Maps API) along with any other category-specific fields you’d like to include.
Facebook Integration
Using the Facebook Open Graph API, we’ve built in a nifty Facebook sign-in option to really ‘wow’ your customers.
The regular WordPress registration options still are available so this just adds another convenient way for your visitors to instantly register and sign into your site. No plugins or headaches to deal with. It just works (minimal setup is required).
Membership Packs
In addition to the custom ad packages already included with ClassiPress, you can now setup conditional membership packs.
For example, you can create a 30-day unlimited membership pack where your customers can submit as many ads as they want within the given time period. It’s the “all you can eat” pricing model which many of you have been asking for.
Custom Ad Write Panel
Administrators now have much better visibility into each ad with the custom ad write panel. The panel neatly organizes all the custom meta fields allowing you to update/change values with ease.
In addition, you can see the uploaded images associated to the ad and also add/remove images without having to visit the media library.
AppThemes API
We’ve also introduced the AppThemes API which enables developers to customize functionality without having to modify the core theme code. There are now over 75 new action hooks throughout ClassiPress (and all our other themes) and we’re excited to see what our community comes up with! We will soon be releasing tutorials and more details on how to use these hooks.
Payment Plugin Support
In addition to the 75 new hooks, we’ve included five payment gateway-specific hooks that allow developers to build add-on payment plugins. We’ve already built a Google Checkout ClassiPress plugin (free) that you can install with your existing ClassiPress site.
Download it. Reverse engineer it. Fork it. It’s there for you to use. You will also be able to download the ClassiPress payment gateway plugin template to get started from scratch on other payment gateways. We’re still finishing it up so stay tuned for more details soon.
This opens up a huge opportunity for 3rd-parties looking to sell (or giveaway) ClassiPress plugins so what are you waiting for? Get crackin!
Besides all the new features and fixes, we’ve also made some optimization tweaks to speed up page loads. The list of goodness goes on so continue reading the rest of the fixes and changes all rolled up into 3.1 below.
Changes:
- added new classipress dashboard metrics – total customers today, yesterday, and overall
- added date registered, last login, & number of ads columns to the WordPress admin users page
- added option to sort by date registered, last login, & posts columns to the WordPress admin users page
- added the from and email address info to the body of the “contact ad poster” email
- upgraded Google Maps API from 2.0 to 3.0. No longer requires API key. Removed legacy fields & added region & language
- moved all hardcoded taxonomy and post type names to constants so it’s easy to change in one place
- added new db table and update script for geocoding each ad listing so radius search is very accurate
- added javascript set focus on username field on login, register, forgot password pages
- new ad images now use the ad title as the alt/caption text instead of image file name (i.e. 23456.jpg)
- admin option tabs now show selected tab after save is complete
- renamed ad sidebar id from sidebar_ad to sidebar_listing due to ad blocker plugin issue
- added the new AppThemes API framework which enables 75+ new hooks throughout the theme
- added new theme-actions.php file for functions using the new theme hooks
- added fade transition to the colorbox.js image previewer on single ads
- added two new comments files for ad listing and pages for greater hook control
- modularized the payment processing engine and added new payment hooks to allow for plugins
- added pricing option to charge for “only featured listings”
- added option to remove the “No Categories” text from the categories lists
- enhanced the theme-scripts javascript by moving it into a PHP file for use with user options controlling javascript objects
- enhanced customer WordPress menus to also allow sub page navigation
- added custom menu navigation area to control dashboard links
- added classipress option to turn on and off “clean price” function and added developers filter ‘appthemes_clean_price’
- added login_form do_action to the custom login page. also replaced hardcoded register with wp_register function
- added Misc category during theme install so that posting is possible without configuring a new category
- maps tab now only shows up if a piece of the address can be found on the post
- added min length field to all “text box” fields which can be set in the Custom Fields option page
- added new edit ad WP admin write panel which contains all ad custom fields, images, and ad info
- added second parameter to the cp_get_price() function so we can use on ad edit write panel
- added ad listing time picker format to edit ad write panel
- upgraded jQuery validate from 1.6 to 1.8.1 which includes several new language packs and jQuery 1.6 compatibility fixes
- upgraded jQuery from 1.4.4 to 1.6.1 for the Google CDN advanced option
- removed jQuery core from the Google CDN advanced option since it loads ALL scripts
- switched to WordPress jQuery UI and use other jQuery components that are dependent on them
- restyled all select drop-down menus using jQuery so user experience is consistent across all browsers
- changed font size for search box and drop-down category menu
- implemented many extra security protocols by escaping fields and sql statements
- added Turkish Lira as a new PayPal currency payment option
- added new IPN debug check on system info page to help with troubleshooting
- better optimized the install script and added a new db only upgrade script which can manually be run
- added the sortable id column to the admin users view since WordPress core no longer includes it
- moved theme and child theme css functions from theme-header into theme-enqueue for faster load speed
- after admin logs in, they’re redirected to the ClassiPress dashboard instead of WordPress dashboard
- removed Gravatar hovercards option since it no longer appears to be working. need to test further in 3.2
- added a default ad, ad category, and tags when brand new install
- added post_class(); and id to the blog post loop div to give better control over individual items
Fixes:
- fixed problem with “sticky” option showing up multiple times in WP3.1
- updated appthemes function issue related to international dates on the dashboard
- fixed spelling in filename theme-depricated.php to theme-deprecated.php
- added an IE9 hack to avoid cufon scripting issue and tested to make sure all other browsers were not affected
- fixed WordPress custom menu navigation for use in all browsers and validated XHTML on the menu
- fixed colorbox and flash embed overlay issue
- fixed issue with prices field acting different between posting and editing
- fixed checkbox single page CSV display issue to now automatically ad spaces between the values
- fixed price to place ad calculation when using % of sellers ad price option
- fixed pagination counting issue on the “Most Popular” tab on the homepage
- fixed Radio and Checkbox not showing correctly in preview issue
- fixed form layouts “modified” times to be properly updated when forms are changed and saved
- fixed sub-category so it doesn’t display the sidebar widget when no sub categories exist (instead of “No categories”)
- moved validate js calls to individual admin pages to avoid conflict with edit ad/post meta field buttons
- issue where search auto-complete would not escape html entities (i.e & would be &)
- dashboard widgets no longer show move icon when hover on bar
- issue where html was allowed to be passed into non-text area fields
- added padding left style to embedded ad objects so native videos are centered
- added missing css div class around post-block to show white border and match the rest of the blocks
- added a min height to the home page tabs section to reduce page jump on tab change
- added a show/hide function for the pricing admin option tab to only show relevant fields
- new installs will attempt to set permalink structure and then flush rewrite rules instead of manually having to do
- bug when image gallery was embedded in blog post and created an error. created new attachment page template to handle it
- fixed trackback/pingback section for blog posts so they now properly display
- escaped comment fields to improve security
How Can I Get This Version?
Existing customers can login to their customer account and download the latest version.
How Do I Upgrade?
If you haven’t made any changes to the theme files then the easiest method is to just do a complete upgrade (download the full 3.1 version). Then follow the “Upgrade from 3.0.5.x to 3.1” guide. If you’ve made modifications to the core theme files, then it’s going to be a bit harder to upgrade. We still recommend doing a complete upgrade and then use the new API hooks instead of modifying the core theme code. This will make upgrades a cinch in the future.
Questions?
Anything related to support should be posted in the support forum where our dedicated support team can assist you.
What Files Have Changed?
As you are aware, we typically we offer a patch (a .zip of just the modified files) but it doesn’t make much sense this time because almost every file has been modified.